Insurgency

To properly assess options for improving security along the troubled Afghanistan-Pakistan border, it is crucial to empirically characterize what insecurity exists. The role, type, evolution, and migration of homemade bombs – known by the American military as improvised explosive devices or IEDs – have gone underexamined in attempts to understand instability throughout the Pashtun regions of southern Afghanistan and the western Pakistani province of Balochistan.

Al-Qaeda Central, the organization led by Osama bin Laden and likely based somewhere in Pakistan, is today primarily a media phenomenon. Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, it has not succeeded in carrying out a similarly ambitious operation, although it has been effective at spreading its message globally over the Internet.

On March 10, 2010, the New America Foundation hosted Matthew Alexander to discuss effective interrogation techniques. In his talk, Alexander argued that coercive interrogation methods are ineffective at obtaining information and counterproductive to the war on terror.

In his experience, Alexander said, suspects treated with respect and consideration are much more likely to share information than those threatened or tortured. Alexander stressed that torture is not an “enhanced method of interrogation,” as it is frequently referred to.

The bomber, a Jordanian doctor linked to al Qaeda, detonated his explosives on December 30, 2009, at an American base in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, killing himself and seven CIA officers and contractors who were operating at the heart of the covert program overseeing U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s volatile northwestern tribal regions.

In 2006, the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba entered the Afghan theater, necessitating its increased presence in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The group is often mentioned during discussions of the Punjabi Taliban, militants from Punjabi jihadi groups, who arrived in large numbers at approximately the same time. But these militants follow the Deobandi school of Islam and are close to the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban.

On February 26, Slate’s Chris Wilson, Colonel Jim Hikey, Scott Helfstein, and “Matthew Alexander” (a pseundonym) explored the surprisingly hi-tech hunt for Iraq's dictator in 2003, and ways such tools continue to change U.S. war-fighting. The panelists were introduced by New America President Steve Coll. The event was moderated by Peter Bergen, Co-Director of the Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative.

The New America Foundation and Slate magazine today announced a new partnership, focusing on emerging technologies and their transformative effects on society and public policy.

Central to the partnership is the "Future Tense" event series, which brings together issue experts and provocative thinkers from all disciplines to look beyond today's headlines. Both Slate and New America will be complementing these discussions with original web content, and exploring new ways to continue the conversations online.

The capture of the Afghan Taliban's operational commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in the Pakistani city of Karachi is a signature success for the United States' effort in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it does not indicate that the insurgent movement will collapse.

In the short run, local Taliban commanders will be able to maintain the movement's operational effectiveness against U.S. and NATO troops. Over the long term, however, increased collaboration between American and Pakistani intelligence agencies could prove debilitating for the movement.